Some of the advantages offered by a typical network-based commerce facility, such as an Internet-based auction facility, are the simplicity, promptness and convenience of participating in the online trading process. Conducting transaction such as an auction over a network-based commerce facility has become very popular. Demands for using the network-based commerce facility to transact business have increased drastically.
Many businesses have seen this as an opportunity to expand and enhance services associated with the services provided by the network-based commerce facility. E-commerce development can be very expensive. The costs to drive traffic are high and their effectiveness is questionable. Start up companies, businesses, or developers cannot easily develop a network-based commerce facility. These parties (e.g., developers) have developed third-party applications that create programs to enhance user experience for users of the network-based commerce facility. For instance, these developers create programs that the network-based commerce facility may not have. Alternatively, these developers may wish to integrate their current applications to work with a particular popular network-base commerce facility and extend their platforms into new business areas.
These third-party application programs may be extremely valuable for users who conduct a great deal of business transactions using the network-based commerce facility and these users would like to have the information presented to attract buyers in a way that may be different from the network-based commerce facility. The developers of the type of situation mentioned above may also include businesses having many of items listed for trading activities on the network-based commerce facility and may wish to have the users interact with the network-based commerce facility through the businesses' Websites. Thus, the third-party developers may be developing the programs to expand services provided to their clients.
However, current technology does not enable easy access to the valuable data on a particular network-based commerce facility to assist in developing a third-party application. To develop the third-party application programs for these businesses' Web sites, the developers need to access the network-based commerce facility just like an ordinary user would.
FIG. 1 illustrates that like a user of a network-based commerce facility, for instance, an online auction facility 100, the developers (or through their application programs) can only access the network-based commerce facility by accessing a user interface 106. The user interface 106 contains application programs that accept requests from the all users including the developers. These application programs however, typically emit HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or other formats that enable the users to easily interact with the network-based commerce facility. The results containing the data are presented in some particular predetermined set up and layout.
The developers then have to “scrape” the results to obtain the essential data that the developers like to use. Scraping occurs when the developers interact with the database 102 through the user interface 106 to get the data that the developers like to incorporate into their applications. To do this, the developers utilize routines that search and extract the necessary elements from the HTML results. Essentially, scraping is emulating browsers such as Internet explore or Netscape that are used to interact with the user interface 106.
One problem with current technology is that whenever the layout or set up for the user interface 106 is changed, a major problem presents itself. Routines written to search and extract data received from the user interface 106 will not work when the layout or the set up is changed, even only slightly. Because the data received by third-party application are in HTML, the routine must be precise to indicate where to search and where to extract the data. A change in the layout or the set up thus leads to the need to rewrite the routines in order to extract necessary data.
Moreover, the third-party applications under the current art slow down the particular network-based commerce facility with the amount of information that these third-party applications request. One cause for that is that the third-party applications typically request for much more data than an ordinary user's request. This activity hinders other ordinary users from accessing the network-based commerce facility.
The third-party applications access the network-based commerce facility with no special access privilege different from an ordinary user. It is thus difficult for the developers to create applications that enhance user experience without undue and continuous efforts to accommodate for any changes. The developers are thus left vulnerable and their applications are consequently unreliable due to the constant changes in the set up or layout at the particular network-based commerce facility.